Read Online The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: George Lakoff
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falling over and blowing open the door to the Arctic freezer . . .
This big slug of deadly cryosphere air slipped its North Pole moorings, marauded across Canada, and swept through the eastern US . . .
When the winds weaken, the vortex can begin to wobble like a drunk on his fourth martini . . . in this case, nearly the entire polar vortex has tumbled southward . . .
Responsible journalists can do better.
Responsible journalists need to discuss systemic causation. Certainly when discussing global warming and its climate effects, and also when discussing other systemic effects—such as those of fracking, the privatization of education, the decline of unions, and so on.
Responsible journalists also need to discuss a devastating systemic effect on our economics, recently discovered but not brought into public discourse by the press: the systemic effect of the relationship between productive wealth and reinvestment wealth.
The version of systemic causation just discussed is designed to fit global warming phenomena. In addition, there are other forms of systemic causation that we will be discussing, for example, in the study of economics. But for our purposes in this book, the most important form of systemic causation concerns the brain itself. The phenomenon of reflexivity is a form of systemic causation. And the relationship between our politics and the concept of personhood is one of the hardest cases of systemic causation to get across to the public, especially to political pundits, policy makers, strategists, pollsters, and other political professionals.
★ 5 ★
Politics and Personhood
E ach of us has a sense of personal identity: your sense of who you are as a person. Central to that personal identity is a moral sense, a sense of what is right and wrong, what justifies our actions. That moral sense, like all that we believe and understand, is physical, built into the neural circuitry of our brains. If that changes, if the circuitry characterizing our moral sense changes, it changes our personhood. That is, it changes the kind of people we are: what we think is right and how we act.
We have seen that all politics is moral, since political policies are assumed to be right, not wrong or irrelevant. Our political divisions come down to moral divisions, characterized in our brains by very different brain circuitry. We’ve seen that the major moral divisions in our politics derive from two opposed models of the family: a progressive (nurturant parent) morality and a conservative (strict father) morality. That is no accident, since your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.
The effect of family life is complex, and peers have an effect as well. One result of that is biconceptualism. Biconceptuals have both kinds of moral circuitry in their brain, mutually inhibiting each other and applying to different issues, person by person. There is no “middle,” no morally based political ideology common to all moderates.
Regardless of whether you are progressive, conservative, or biconceptual, though, your morality—your sense of what a person should be and do—is deeply connected to the way your brain triggers emotions and determines whether you feel good or bad in certain situations and about certain ideas. It is worth understanding why.
The Science behind Empathy and Morality
One of the great discoveries of neuroscience is the mirror neuron system. Simply put, that system operates in our brains and gives us the capacity to connect with others, to know and even feel what they feel, and to connect with the natural world. It is the heart of our capacity for empathy. From emotion research, we know that certain emotions correlate with certain actions in our own bodies—in facial muscles, in posture, and so on. When we feel happy, for instance, our facial muscles are prompted to produce a smile, as opposed to a frown or a baring of the teeth. We also know that the
This big slug of deadly cryosphere air slipped its North Pole moorings, marauded across Canada, and swept through the eastern US . . .
When the winds weaken, the vortex can begin to wobble like a drunk on his fourth martini . . . in this case, nearly the entire polar vortex has tumbled southward . . .
Responsible journalists can do better.
Responsible journalists need to discuss systemic causation. Certainly when discussing global warming and its climate effects, and also when discussing other systemic effects—such as those of fracking, the privatization of education, the decline of unions, and so on.
Responsible journalists also need to discuss a devastating systemic effect on our economics, recently discovered but not brought into public discourse by the press: the systemic effect of the relationship between productive wealth and reinvestment wealth.
The version of systemic causation just discussed is designed to fit global warming phenomena. In addition, there are other forms of systemic causation that we will be discussing, for example, in the study of economics. But for our purposes in this book, the most important form of systemic causation concerns the brain itself. The phenomenon of reflexivity is a form of systemic causation. And the relationship between our politics and the concept of personhood is one of the hardest cases of systemic causation to get across to the public, especially to political pundits, policy makers, strategists, pollsters, and other political professionals.
★ 5 ★
Politics and Personhood
E ach of us has a sense of personal identity: your sense of who you are as a person. Central to that personal identity is a moral sense, a sense of what is right and wrong, what justifies our actions. That moral sense, like all that we believe and understand, is physical, built into the neural circuitry of our brains. If that changes, if the circuitry characterizing our moral sense changes, it changes our personhood. That is, it changes the kind of people we are: what we think is right and how we act.
We have seen that all politics is moral, since political policies are assumed to be right, not wrong or irrelevant. Our political divisions come down to moral divisions, characterized in our brains by very different brain circuitry. We’ve seen that the major moral divisions in our politics derive from two opposed models of the family: a progressive (nurturant parent) morality and a conservative (strict father) morality. That is no accident, since your family life has a profound effect on how you understand yourself as a person.
The effect of family life is complex, and peers have an effect as well. One result of that is biconceptualism. Biconceptuals have both kinds of moral circuitry in their brain, mutually inhibiting each other and applying to different issues, person by person. There is no “middle,” no morally based political ideology common to all moderates.
Regardless of whether you are progressive, conservative, or biconceptual, though, your morality—your sense of what a person should be and do—is deeply connected to the way your brain triggers emotions and determines whether you feel good or bad in certain situations and about certain ideas. It is worth understanding why.
The Science behind Empathy and Morality
One of the great discoveries of neuroscience is the mirror neuron system. Simply put, that system operates in our brains and gives us the capacity to connect with others, to know and even feel what they feel, and to connect with the natural world. It is the heart of our capacity for empathy. From emotion research, we know that certain emotions correlate with certain actions in our own bodies—in facial muscles, in posture, and so on. When we feel happy, for instance, our facial muscles are prompted to produce a smile, as opposed to a frown or a baring of the teeth. We also know that the
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